17th August 2021
Tuesday evening is here and we're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club. The first game of the night was Space Base, read my blog about it here.
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15th August 2021
Splendor was the next game we played on Board Game Arena on gaming Sunday. Read my blog here. 15th August 2021
Sunday evening gaming on Board Game Arena continues, the next game of the night was Roll for The Galaxy. Read my thoughts about it here. 15th August 2021 Sunday evening is here again and I'm my living room logged into Board Game Arena on my PC for some gaming goodness. First up was 6 nimmit!. 6 nimmit! is 6 takes in German, it's quite an abstract game and the name will make sense when you seen the rules. What's in a game? 6 nimmit is a card game and comes with a deck of 104 cards number from 1 to... you guessed it... 104 and that's it for game components. Each card also displays one or more symbols which are endearingly known as bullheads. Bullheads are bad. The cards are normal quality as you'd expect. There's pretty much no artwork to speak off, other than the symbol for bullheads and colours used to mark out cards which have more than 1 bullhead symbol. The game has no iconography other than numbers and bullheads and being an abstract game, doesn't need anything else. How's it play? Setup
On to play 6 nimmit! is played over several rounds and the goal is for players to empty their hand of cards and avoid collecting other cards as much as possible each round, which is not as easy as you might think... How is this done, well read on.
Endgame Play continues through rounds until at the end of a round, in which at least one player has accumulated 66 or more bullheads.. Points are tallied, the player who has collected the lowest number of bullheads wins. Overall
As per the brevity of this blog post, 6 nimmit! is a very simple game to learn, it's also a curious mix of strategy and unpredictability. The objective is obviously to try and not collect cards, they'll be times that a player will want to play lower value cards to 'get into' a row before it gets to 5 cards, conversely, they'll times they want to play higher cards to go later and hope someone plays the 6th card in a row to clear it out. Sometimes players will want to play very low and choose which row to take because it's the best of a bad set of choices, the bullheads a row may contain can vary greatly. Also choosing which row to take presents a player with the opportunity to mess with other players. Watching a row you planned to play a card into vanish and leave a much worse alternative is quite the surprise. And that's the thing, while some card plays can be much safer than others, it's almost always never 100% safe and it's other players bring that element of aforementioned of unpredictability to the game. Quick to pick-up-and-play, 6 nimmit! can be a lot of fun with its surprises and reversals -of-fortune, provided you don't find playing fairly randomised games frustrating and you're not too much of a serious gamer. 10th August 2021 We're with the Woking Gaming Club for board gaming night at The Sovereigns in Woking for the second and final game of the evening. So apparently, if you're a kid, the most important things to you, other than building a fort, is pizza and toys. Welcome to Fort, a game about very fickle personal relationships! What's in a game?
The cards and boards are pretty standard, normal quality components, what you'd expect from a modern game. The tokens are anything but average, big, chunky and colourful, they're a great addition to the game. Stylised child-like art is used throughout Fort to decorate its cards and components, normally against a plain but colourful background, fairly effective art in my opinion. Fort uses a lot of iconography; between the 7 suits on the cards and a plethora of symbols for card actions, there quite a lot to remember and the stylised art used for icons isn't always instantly clear. It's not a gamebreaker by any means but it does add to the learning curve. How's it play? Setup
On to play A round is pretty standard in Fort, the active player plays a card and the other players react. Then the player to the left becomes the active player.
Endgame There are 3 ways the endgame can be triggered. If the park deck is depleted. If any player reaches 25 or higher on the victory track. If any player reaches fort level 5, they acquire the Macaroni Sculpture Card. Once one of these criteria have been met, the current round is completed. Points can come the victory track, fort level, made up rule cards and the Macaroni Sculpture Card. Points are tallied, highest score wins. Overall
The central theme and premise behind Fort is quite clever and charming. That is that friend cards are literally friends: Don't play a friend card, then that friend may go hang out with another player, although best friends are always loyal and more potential friends may be found at the park. Building a fort is of paramount importance as are pizzas and toys. Halcyon days! Fort blends together a bit of deck-building and a bit of drafting. Broadly speaking it provides players with the choice of performing actions to increase their victory points, or build up their fort. One provides points towards winning and the other confers benefits which hopefully helps later on. Another very important strategy here is to watch what other players put into their yards, some vulture-like scavenging may net the sharp-eyed player's a useful card, simultaneously denying another player of it. Thus players will also want to play as many of their 5 cards as possible, minimising the risk of losing friends. The better combos a player can generate, the more cards they can play. But despite this, I found Fort a finicky game to play, there's lots of suits to remember, somewhat indecipherable iconography to navigate and occasionally overly-complex actions to comprehend. The rule about having to fully complete an action in order to perform it all was a sticking point for me. I'm sure it's there's for balancing or a legitimate reason, but it felt so unnecessary and counter-intuitive. It's frustrating being unable to use a card because it's too powerful and having to discard it into the yard, only to watch another player snatch it up. It turns Fort from what could have been light, breezy and quick, into slow, pedestrian grind instead. Fort is a mechanically sound game with a strong theme and great presentation but somehow becomes a forgettable experience. 10th August 2021
It's a Tuesday evening and we're at The Sovereigns in Woking with the Woking Gaming Club. The first game of the night was Roll for The Galaxy, read my blog about it here. 8th August 2021
The final game of gaming Sunday on Board Game Arena was Codex Naturalis. Read my blog about it here. 8th August 2021
Sunday gaming on Board Game Arena continued with Railroad Ink. Read my thoughts about it here. 8th August 2021
Sunday night gaming continued on Board Game Arena and the next game was Love Letter. Read my thoughts about it here. |
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